Friday, August 15, 2008

NVIDIA Shows Interactive Ray Tracing on GPUs

Breaking news from SIGGRAPH 2008, Interactive real-time ray tracing using NVIDA GPU's. In the graphics world, ray tracing is a technique used to generate an image by tracing the rays or paths of light as they bounce through and around the objects in a scene. When done right, ray tracing can produce photorealistic imagery because shadows are cast correctly, water and other materials show proper reflections with correct coloring, and lighting in general just looks more realistic. The problem with ray tracing is that the algorithms necessary for producing photorealistic imagery are very complex and require much more compute power than is available in today's PCs, if the imagery is to be rendered in real-time, at a high enough frame rate to produce fluid motion, i.e. for gaming. Full news at the link below.NVIDA SIGGRAPH Demo